Chapter Twenty Five

When he came back through, and found her waiting nervously, he stopped. He took in her appearance, the gear she wore for crimefighting… or, once, just crime. It wasn’t exactly at the same standard as his Nightwing suit, but that was to be expected. Nightwing’s suit was literally worth millions in materials, and had been made by the best combat armour craftsmen that the hero world had to offer- The Bats, or more accurately, Lucius Fox and Bruce himself.

But… “Okay, look, I’ve never commented on it, but we gotta do something about your gear, Harls.” Dick gestured at her.

She was wearing a leather jacket, a crop top that emphasised her cleavage and exposed her smooth and tight stomach, and a pair of booty shorts that barely managed to cover her ass. Her legs had some tights on, and a pair of long socks came to her knees, with combat boots on her feet. Her hair was parted in her signature twintail style, even if the blue and pink dye at the ends had faded significantly. All of it was coloured and patterned in her red and black diamonds motif, known throughout Gotham as Harley Quinn’s style.

She parted her lips in fake outrage, and sassily said, “What? Ya tellin’ me ya don’t think I look hot?” She lifted her arms to interlock her hands behind her head, posing in a way that instantly drew his eyes to her chest.

He swallowed, and pulled control of himself back. “You look like walking sex, Harls, and we both know it.” She smirked at him cheekily, and he continued, losing the lightness to a serious tone, “But… you’ve got no protection in that. No armour- hell, you don’t even have clothes on half of your skin. And don’t get me started on how the sex appeal practically paints you as a target for the worst of the scum-”

Dick cut himself off, seeing how her face was falling. He took a moment to look at her, properly, turning off the part of him that was Batman talking to his companions, and letting Nightwing’s kindness and analytical skill take the fore.

She was shifting on her feet slightly. A tremor ran through her hands, kept against her sides. She wouldn’t look at him directly, but had her gaze fixed at his feet not her own. She- Jesus, she was not just anxious and embarrassed, but actually afraid.

Dick could slap himself. He intentionally dropped the professional tone that he’d slipped into with the suit, and spoke genuinely to her, gently. “Harls, hey- Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t realise…”

She started slightly at the shift and the apology, and her eyes flicked up to his for a second, before she relaxed minutely. The fear was gone, now he wasn’t trying to go all judgemental hero on her. Unfortunately, that left the embarrassment to take the lead.

Harley wrapped a hand around her upper arm, keeping her eyes away from him. When she spoke, he hated how small she was making herself sound and look. “Nah, I get it. It’s shit, I know. It’s just my old getup, and Mistah- and Joker, he ain’t… didn’t care much ‘bout if ‘ah got hurt, yanno?”

“Harls, no…” Dick moved to her and gently grabbed her shoulders, prompting her to finally look up at her. There was an unshed tear welling in one of her eyes, and he carefully lifted a gloved finger and wiped it away.

He was glad he hadn’t put on his mask yet, so when he looked at her she could see how his eyes shone with sincerity as he said, “It’s not shit, you look amazing. I’m just- It makes me worry, okay? I have all this armour in my suit compared to yours, and I still get hurt. So when I think about you in this scanty- but sexy!- getup, it scares me.”

Her eyes shot wide at the admission, and her lips parted slightly in shock. He wrapped her in a quick hug, not wanting to kiss her when she was so ****. As he went to pull away, he said, “It’s alright. I’ll get over it, you don’t need to- HMPH?!”

She yanked him forwards into a quick affectionate kiss, full of a dozen things neither of them would say aloud that Dick didn’t have time to process with how quick it was, once again reminding him to stop trying and predict Harley Quinn’s behaviour.

When she let go and stepped away, brushing imaginary mess from one tail of her hair, she said with a very obviously casual tone, “I guess a couple ‘ah upgrades would be good.”

She exchanged a carefully constructed polite smile that couldn’t quite hide her giddiness with Dick, and he returned a nearly identical one. Copying her tone of exaggerated casualness, he said, “I guess I have a few things I could share.”

The moment lasted right up until Harley’s lips quirked a little too hard in resistance, and Dick’s smile grew ever so slightly in response. Then, a little laugh escaped him, and she let out her own, and their composure broke to the giddy smiles each held.

Dick went to his little hidden nook where he kept his Nightwing gear and other pieces of his hero life, rifling through it for appropriate pieces of equipment that met the requirements. He lugged the surprisingly large array back to the living room, and spread it out on the table.

Thus began the impromptu makeover montage.

–

“You’re already wearing gloves, so just swap them for these.” Dick tosses a pair of spares at her. They were mostly black, with a single hint of Nightwing blue near the cuff. He stared at it a little, and quietly added under his breath, “Might have a dye kit somewhere…”

–

“What about a cape?” He unfurled one of the Robin capes and Harley stared at him so judgmentally that he refolded it, muttering sulkily, “You could’ve just said no…”

–

Dick held up an old prototype pair of forearm gauntlets, clearly meant to be a part of the Batsuit. He considered them against her arms, as if they wouldn’t be loose by several inches.

She raised an eyebrow at him and said, “Ain’t no way those don’t fall off, Nightie. I’m a gymnast, not a fightah’, I don’t got big sexy forearms like ya.”

He pursed his lips and nodded, “You’re right…” He turned and handed her a different pair. These were a lighter design with less armour, but narrower and adjustable. The inner side was black and the outer forearm was a shade of red shockingly close to her colour scheme. Less of a bright red, slightly darker, as if trying to convey a warning and threat.

At her questioning look, he just waved a hand and said, “Suit design I never used, had red instead of blue.”

–

When he lifted the yellow utility belt, a spare from when he was Robin, he didn’t even get to speak before Harley rejected it, “Not a chance, Bird-brain. Don’t care what toys it’s got, I ain’t puttin’ that yellow on my outfit.”

Dick sighed and put it down.

–

Dick stared intently at her chest for a long minute, until she lifted her hands to awkwardly hover, as if intending to do something with her top but not sure what to do. “Is there somethin’ wrong with my top? Or are ya just perving?”

He blinked a few times, startled slightly by her question. “Huh? No, no, just- I was trying to think of something more protective than your top, but all of my spare stuff isn’t designed for…” His eyes drifted down to her breasts again, before shooting up to meet her eyes with a visible strain instead.

Harley smirked. Dick blushed.

–

“The boots are good enough…” He dug through the pile a minute, then pulled something out. “... but put these on your legs.”

He passed her a pair of guards designed to wrap around the shin, basically the same as the forearm ones from earlier but wider to accommodate the calf. The colour scheme was the same, too, she noted with a sense of satisfaction.

–

By the end of it, Harley was… well, she didn’t look like she was particularly professionally equipped, but she didn’t look like an amateur anymore.

The leather jacket had stayed, as had the top, but the interior lining and the collar of the jacket now had some scavenged plating from his older gear reinforcing it, so if she got shot or stabbed, it’d provide some resistance. Her forearms and shins were wrapped in the red and black guards taken from an older and unused design of Nightwing’s suit. Her little fingerless gloves had been swapped for a tightened pair of his current ones, lightly armoured and with reinforcement on the knuckles. She’d swapped the shorts for a pair of skintight leather pants and he’d managed to get her to wear a belt- a normal one, not a utility one- so she could carry a couple of necessities like a spare comms in the little pouch he gave her.

If you looked too closely, you began to notice how the gear wasn’t designed for her. The contours of the armour are slightly off to accommodate a masculine form, not a very feminine one. The gloves don’t quite match the forearm gauntlets, and the shin pieces don’t cleanly meet the combat boots. Little signs that stood out to someone like Dick, trained to notice them, but probably wouldn’t be noted by most people.

He met her excited blue eyes, and realised one thing was missing. “Hang on. Just one last thing…”

He scooped up the pile of unused gear and took it back to the hidden nook. Instead of putting it away, he just dumped it in to sort later, and grabbed the final touch of Harley’s transformation.

Her eyes flicked to him as he entered the room again, silently questioning. He walked up to her, and pulled what he’d grabbed out of his pocket. He lifted it to her face, gently pressing the edges against her skin to form a seal, and then grinned at her.

The white lenses of his own mask blinked back, and Harley said, “Nightie, are you sur- Jeez! This thing is crazy clear! Why can I see so good?”

He sniggered a little, and even through the mask, he could feel her glare on him. “It calibrates to your eyesight and enhances the image to match. So… you probably need glasses.”

“...damn. I wanna be mad, but this is too cool!” She grinned brightly, only faltering when she looked at him and said, “But wait, are ya sure? This is one of ya masks-”

He clasped her hand and simply said, “And I want you to use it.”